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Piano Rehearsal Tracks

MusicalSingers.com now offers custom piano accompaniments!

When preparing for auditions, NEVER USE THE CAST RECORDING to practice with. The best investment you can make is in a piano track in YOUR KEY. Your favorite broadway star and their accompanying orchestra will not be in the audition room with you, but a single, professional pianist will. Being prepared and comfortable with piano-only accompaniment is essential in your audition success. Need your song recorded by a professional in your specific key? Done. MP3 to your inbox and you’re on your way.

Custom piano rehearsal tracks are $15 for the first 2 pages and $3 for each additional page. Not sure what your audition cut should be? We’ll help you decide. Email us to get started.

For one week before and one week after the launch of the new MusicalSingers.com, we conducted a survey to learn more about you, the rockin’ singers of the musical world. Part of the purpose of this site is to build community. To find encouragement in knowing you’re not alone in this journey to accomplish your dreams! So here’s a cross section of you, our readers, where you’re from, what your struggles are, and who you’d like to hear from most.

If we boiled the results down into a “reader profile,” it would look like this: Our average reader is a either in college or holding an advanced degree and working in regional theatre across the United States.

Your Challenges

As far as challenges facing musical singers, here’s how you weighed in with the topics presented:

Finding audition music, auditions, and marketing yourself were at the top of the list. For audition topics, be sure to check frequently the “auditions” tab in our category list above. To find audition music, there are great sites such as MusicNotes.com, SheetMusicPlus.com, and PianoTrax.com. If you need help picking a song that fits your range, the show, and the character you’re auditioning for, or just have general auditions questions, post a question in our Auditions Forums here and our MusicalSingers tribe will rally to help you out!

Song Selection and Tips (especially for open mic nights or piano bars)

As you may have determined by now, the competition to actually get into a musical is pretty tough, especially if you’re in a major city such as New York. However, there are ways for you to get up in front of an audience and sing songs from musicals (just about to) your heart’s content…

…at “open mic” nights at any number of nightclubs or cabarets, or at most any piano bar. Most piano bars welcome guest singers (especially if the singer has a decent voice, or at least knows what they’re doing), and the backbone of any piano bar player’s repertoire comes from musicals.

I have been a piano bar player for over 30 years. (How did that happen?) I have developed a reputation of being a “singer’s accompanist”: I not only try to “follow” any singer who may be singing with me, but I can usually transpose songs to the singer’s optimum key. You may find a piano player like me but others are only able to offer the arrangement, tempo and key that they know. So it doesn’t hurt to get ahold of standard sheet music, so you know what’s out there. [Find Broadway Sheet Music]

Winning an Audience – Song Choices

Unlike choosing songs for an audition where the off-the-beaten-track number is usually appreciated and can stand out, that is not the case at most piano bars. Sure, every once in a while, if there’s some obscure song that you know that either the piano player also happens to know or else you hand him the music and he (or she) can read it, you might score with the right delivery and a receptive crowd. But for the most part, the crowd at a piano bar is far more appreciative of the tried and true, the familiar. They almost don’t care if it’s done badly, as long as it’s a song they know and love. Of course there are those piano bars, or more properly piano bar players, who pride themselves in knowing the most obscure of songs: songs cut from hit shows; songs cut from shows that never reached Broadway; some song by the likes of Cole Porter that was unearthed in a trunk where he had buried it. But for the most part, people want to hear the songs they know, no matter who sings them. The following is a primer of those songs that seem to get the most mileage with any crowd.

Note that the following are my suggestions. Don’t howl if I leave out your favorite song or some obvious all-time great standard – but perhaps some songs on this list will spark your interest. (more…)